Tertiary Oil Recovery- Know About It in Details

Oil extraction is divided into three stages: primary, secondary, and tertiary, sometimes known as Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). Hydrocarbons that naturally rise to the surface or those that require artificial lift mechanisms, such as pump jacks, are the only ones that can be recovered by primary oil recovery. Water and gas injection are used in secondary recovery to displace the oil and drive it to the surface. Tertiary oil recovery, sometimes known as EOR, is a method of increasing oil production. Although more expensive to implement on a field, EOR can enhance well productivity by up to 75%.

Categories of EOR

To varied degrees, three key categories of EOR have been shown to be financially successful:

Thermal recovery – It is the use of heat, such as the injection of steam, to reduce the viscosity of heavy viscous oil and improve its capacity to flow through the reservoir. Thermal processes account for more than 40% of EOR generation in the United States, especially in California.

Gas injection-In this method, gases such as natural gas, nitrogen, or carbon dioxide (CO2) expand in a reservoir to force additional oil to a production wellbore, or other gases dissolve in the oil to reduce viscosity and improve flow rate. In the United States, gas injection contributes for roughly 60% of EOR output.

Chemical injection- It can involve the use of long-chained molecules known as polymers to boost the efficacy of waterfloods, or the use of detergent-like surfactants to help lower surface tension, which frequently hinders oil droplets from migrating through a reservoir. Chemical approaches account for around 1% of EOR generation in the United States.

Each of these treatments has been limited by their relatively high cost and, in some situations, their unpredictable effectiveness.


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